The first three months of this year already were on course to become Cincinnati’s bloodiest in a decade when the shooting started at the Cameo nightclub on March 26.

The casualty count – 15 wounded and two dead – made Cameo the worst mass shooting in city history. But it also was part of a brutal January, February and March in which 112 people across the city fell victim to gun violence.

An Enquirer analysis of crime data shows the city-wide toll for those months is almost 40 percent higher than in the same period last year and 35 percent higher than the 10-year average.

Even without Cameo, the first quarter of 2017 would have been the city’s most violent since at least 2008.

“The seriousness of the situation is very apparent to us,” Mayor John Cranley said. “Obviously, we’ve had a tragic few weeks.”

The tragedy stretches far beyond Cameo, the East End nightclub where police say victims were caught in a crossfire between rival groups.

Gunshots have claimed victims in 32 of the city’s 52 neighborhoods so far this year, from Mount Auburn to Roselawn to Westwood. Cameo wasn’t even the city’s first mass shooting: Five people were wounded in a drive-by shooting in Northside on Feb. 28.

Overall, 16 victims of shootings in the first quarter of the year died from their wounds, and 96 survived. They are as old as 68 and as young as 9, though most tend to be men in their 20s and 30s.

One victim was shot standing on the balcony of his home in Westwood after confronting a drug dealer. One was celebrating her best friend’s birthday when bullets tore through her Northside apartment.

And one, 9-year-old Alexandrea Thompson, died while her father struggled with a gunman who barged into their Mount Auburn house. Family members said Alexandrea was trying to hide behind her dad when a bullet struck her chest.

Cincinnati police and community leaders aren’t sure what to make of the surge in gun violence. Crime rates rise and fall for many reasons and, sometimes, for no apparent reason at all. Drugs, domestic disputes, easy access to guns, and even the weather all can play a part.

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“It’s like there’s no rhyme or reason why this should be happening,” said Bishop Bobby Hilton, the leader of the Forest Park-basedWord of Deliverance Ministries and an activist in Cincinnati and other communities. “The problem is no one is quite sure what to do about it.”

Three months is a small sample size, which makes diagnosing the problem even more challenging, but police are trying. They say the biggest spike in shootings began in early January and continued through most of February.

Cincinnati first quarter shootings, by year(Photo: The Enquirer/Michael Nyerges)

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Overall shootings by year in Cincinnati.(Photo: The Enquirer/Michael Nyerges)

By Feb. 21, he said, shootings were 82 percent higher than at the same time last year. Police hadn’t seen anything like it in years.

They thought maybe the mild winter was partly responsible, though evidence is mixed on whether criminals, like everyone else, are more active when the weather is nice. But at that point, the reason for the violence mattered less than coming up with a plan to stop it.

So police analyzed the data, shifted officers to trouble spots and pushed hard to bring the numbers down.

Their work was paying off. Daily crime reports show a significant dip in shootings in early March, when the numbers briefly fell below the average for the previous three years. Things seemed to be getting back to normal.

Then Cameo happened.

'Guys shooting at each other'

The nightclub shooting, like all mass shootings, is an aberration. Though there’s no universally-accepted definition of a mass shooting, they account for a small percentage of gun fatalities nationwide.

The FBI puts the figure at less than 1 percent.

But the shootings at Cameo do have some similarities to the gun violence that’s gripped the city this year. Rather than a premeditated act, such as The Pulse nightclub massacre in Florida last year, authorities suspect the Cameo shooting erupted because of a dispute between rivals who had guns and were willing to use them.

The Cameo nightclub on Cincinnati's East End was the scene of a mass shooting March 26 in which 15 were wounded and two were killed.(Photo: Cara Owsley, The Enquirer)

That kind of brazen score-settling is at the heart of many shootings, from domestic disputes to drug dealers fighting for control of street corners and neighborhoods.

The human and financial cost of the violence is high. A single gunshot can upend lives, devastate families and cost tens of thousands of dollars in medical care, court expenses and prison time.

Samaria Evans felt the pain of some of those costs after three small-caliber bullets struck her during the Northside shooting on Feb. 28. The 18-year-old was at a birthday party when someone started shooting from a car outside.

She was hit in the shoulder, ribs and side. She said surgery to remove bullet fragments remains an option. Her arm still hurts and she’s been in and out of doctors’ offices for weeks.

The violence sometimes keeps police and policy makers up at night, too.

Neudigate and other top police officials review data on shootings every day, looking for trends. They scour the numbers for clues about where the violence is worsening and which neighborhoods need more attention.

It’s become a high-tech operation that provides police with up-to-the-hour statistics, right down to the longitude and latitude of every shooting. A key to the effort is a new program called Place-based Investigations of Violent Offender Territories, or PIVOT.

The program is complicated, but the goal is not: Identify hot spots and defuse them before they explode.

“People talk about 90-day plans. If you get to that, you’re already behind the eight ball,” Neudigate said. “What we have is a year-round, 365-day plan. We take best practices nationwide, put our spin on them and tailor them to our community.”

This was the approach police say helped drive down shootings in the weeks before Cameo, and it’s one they hope will help slow the violence over the rest of this year.

“Every time we get a spike like this, they really try new things,” Cranley said of the police. “They were making headway until Cameo.”

A violent trend or a bad few months?

There are limits to what police can do alone, which is why the city has worked for years with the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies to bring federal charges against some of the most violent offenders.

They also rely on community outreach workers who go to crime scenes, talk with neighbors and encourage victims to identify their attackers despite fears of retaliation.

“They’re not trying to fight crime in a vacuum,” City Manager Harry Black said. “It’s going to take collaboration.”

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More than a month after bullets ripped through a Casey Drive apartment, damage still remains on the Northside building.(Photo: The Enquirer/Cameron Knight)

While violent crime in the United States has fallen dramatically since the early 1990s, it has ticked up a bit since 2015, according to the Pew Research Center. And some cities, most notably Chicago, have seen large increases in recent years.

Some neighborhoods are showing improvement. Over-the-Rhine, which is in the midst of a major redevelopment effort, had 38 shootings last year, 20 fewer than in 2008. Avondale and Walnut Hills also saw significant decreases.

Others have struggled as crime has shifted across the city. Westwood, the city’s largest neighborhood, had 41 shootings last year, 26 more than a decade ago. Shootings in Bond Hill and West Price Hill have more than doubled since 2008.

“We’ve got a lot of very positive things going on,” said Pete Witte, a West Price Hill businessman and neighborhood activist. “The problem with these shootings is they totally erode away the positives.

“There’s nothing like gun violence to discourage new businesses and new residents.”

The big question now is what happens next. The fear among city officials and those who live in hard-hit neighborhoods is that the Cameo shooting is part of a trend toward increasing violence.

The hope, however, is it was a tragic end to a bad three months, and that better times are ahead.

“It’s still very possible that by the end of the year, these shooting numbers could level out,” Black said. “We just don’t know.”